“Now let me share this with you”: Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research

Abstract: In this article we attempt to “seize back the creative initiative” to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re‐representing and interpreting data collected through in‐depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng‐Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas.     

THE THERAPEUTIC STATE

State subsidy for the arts in Britain has been determined by a variety of political and social factors over the last two hundred years. This article examines the recent emergence of a therapeutic ethos that has come to shape arts policy in the United Kingdom. It begins with a survey of existing literature describing a shift in Britain’s arts policy since the 1970s. It examines the limitations of existing explanations and suggests another explanatory factor – the growing valorisation of the arts as a therapeutic tool to address social problems. This can be seen in two historically convergent trends: the challenge to cultural authority through the emergence of a therapeutic understanding of creativity, and the reorientation of political activism around issues of culture and wellbeing. Finally, the article considers how and why these ideas became institutionalised in Britain’s main arts policy body – the Arts Council.     

Creativity,health and arts advocacy

Creativity is popularly related to innovation and new ideas. This invention‐cognition view of creativity is too narrow a concept for artistic creativity. Artistic creation is also about reproducing traditions and emotional (“affective”) processes. Widespread use of the popular invention‐cognition view of creativity in arts advocacy obscures wider dimensions of artistic creativity. This article focuses attention on the affective dimension of artistic creation. It surveys “arts therapy” literature and investigates how lessons of this literature can be used to improve the persuasiveness of arts advocacy arguments that appeal to the concept of creativity.     

OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.     

Celebrating the legacy of Mark Williams from the Oconee Valley to far beyond

ABSTRACT

This issue brings together former students of Mark Williams to celebrate his legacy to the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Southeast in honor of his retirement from the University of Georgia. Although best known for his work in his native Oconee Valley of Georgia, Mark has had a wide-ranging career, as briefly summarized in this introductory article. His field schools and classes, true to his often-repeated adage “archaeology is fun or it is nothing,” have inspired many of us to career paths in the field. In the spirit of Mark, participants were encouraged to think creatively about datasets close to their hearts; the articles that follow speak to this passion and to Mark’s enduring legacy.     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.     

Improbable Art: The Creative Economy and Sustainable Cluster Development in a Hong Kong Industrial District

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia analyzes the emergence and functioning of a unique artistic cluster in Hong Kong's Fotan light industrial district. The objective of the research is to understand how artistic work in the cluster, despite some challenges, has thus far proven sustainable in cultural, social, and economic terms. The findings of this case study permit further clarification of several dimensions of an emerging theory of cultural/creative clusters, which should be considered as distinct from business and industrial clusters. Selective comparisons between the Fotan cluster and the Moganshan Lu cluster in Shanghai demonstrate that cultural/creative clusters do not face uniform challenges in striking a balance between economic and cultural sustainability.     

The Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

Machiavelli’s Philosophical Anthropology

This article seeks to address a tension in contemporary scholarship regarding Machiavelli’s view of human nature. While it is common for readers to identify Machiavelli’s rejection of any foundational law that determines the structure of the world, it is just as common for them to abstract human nature from this world and thereby to posit a fixed human essence. Machiavelli is thus seen as an anti-essentialist when it comes to external nature and as an essentialist when it comes to internal human nature. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that for Machiavelli these two interpretations are integrated into an overall ontology of being that rejects all forms of essentialist thinking, including all positive models of human nature. Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed or positive human essence will be demonstrated by analyzing his account of the openness of human being to change and alteration by socialization, and his account of the multiplicity of forms of human doing and being. I argue that Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed essence underlies his affirmation of a negative essence—the specifically human desire for value-formation and the perpetual recreation of the world and, by extension, of the self. An appreciation of this affirmation, furthermore, has important consequences for how we think about Machiavelli’s preferred form of republican institutionalization.     

‘It’s just a very male industry’: gender and work in UK design agencies

The article focuses upon gender divisions of labour in the UK design sector as a means of highlighting a relatively understudied segment of the creative industries. Drawing upon a wider study of design consultancy firms across London, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle, it considers how configurations of gender division are bound up with everyday representations of design labour. The article reveals how associations between craft, skill and masculinity appear, and are reinforced in design practice. It also points to the ways in which design work is valorised within and through constructed geographies of difference between London and the regions, emphasising that hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and reproduced in reference to understandings of activities in place.